Schoolhouse Rock

Are Green Schools Bad Learning Environments?

Neil Snyder — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:52:24 GMT

In many recent publications on the benefits of green school construction, I've noticed a lack of attention to the fact that pretty, green, environmentally friendly schools may not improve the learning environment much.

Take classroom acoustics for example, improved acoustics benefit all children, place less stress on the teacher to be heard, and can help schools struggling to meet academic standards.

There is a voluntary national classroom acoustics standard in place but only a handfull of states and school districts have adopted it. It doesn't cost that much and any cost can be recovered over time.

Why ignore this obstacle that can't be seen but can be heard?

Stop cheating teachers?

NickD — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:49:51 GMT

Let the teachers teach the subject matter they are responsible for. Let someone else administer the tests.

Base the tests on the subject matter the teachers presented with emphasis on the teachers lesson plans.

This will do two things, it will help determine the accuracy of the lesson plans and how well the teachers is actually teaching the subject and helping the students understand the subject. Now we know that students learn differently, some do well simply by hearing the information and others need to see it as well as hear it. others need to do repetitive exercises so as to internalize it. Some may not understand what they know until years later. But generalized testing based on the teachers own notes should give a good generalized picture of the teachers effectiveness.

If we are going to base things on testing then letting teachers teach the test, give the test and then grade the test is no different than letting a CEO set his salary and golden parachute himself. Sure the teachers need to give their own quizzes and grade them so as to see where her students need help or where he or she can improve upon their own class presentations. But the major tests that judge the teachers performance and her students actual achievement before moving on should be done by the administrators, and the grading done with both the teacher and an administrator present so no one can cry foul play.

Note: Cheating teachers is probably not a serious problem. Most really are concerned with their students futures.

"fisticuffs"?

fhdpjosc — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:41:08 GMT

"The school, which currently has about 2,500 students, has long been notorious as one of the worst in the city, with what the L.A. Times recently described as a "reputation for student fisticuffs and an appallingly high dropout rate.""

Cute. "Fisticuffs", huh? 100-200 black and mexican students were involved in a race riot -- one of many. Cops called and showed up in force. Knives taken from some students. They were racially segregated in separate portions of the school. Several arrested and taken downtown. Yet you call it "fisticuffs".

see http://www.gorillafights.com/articles/84/School-Fight-in-LA-High-School.html

On the other hand, a goofy white kid hangs a noose on a tree branch in Jena, and you call down all the forces of hell upon him and his entire community.

You cheer mass race demonstrations even AFTER a black FBI boss determined he had no racial intent.

What goes on in your heads. Really. What makes you think the way you do? What makes you so disgusted at your own skin and so forgiving and understanding of grotesque hatred you see in others?

White folks are demon spawn when they make the slightest mistake (by your lights at least), yet a giant for-real brown/black race riot is "fisticuffs".

Its like we live in two different worlds, with two totally different perceptual systems. With two totally different sets of sense organs.

What seems as plain as the nose on my face is utterly invisible, completely incomprehensible to you.

A hate-filled, violent race riot becomes a schoolyard spat -- mere fisticuffs -- because you live in horror of having to admit to the ugly reality.

A substantial number of Blacks and Mexicans are racist, they like to kill each other, and they are not going to stop.

You wouldn't hesitate to say that very thing if white students were involved, but since they are not, you just turn your head away and do not see, do not hear.

"Fisticuffs" indeed.

Race, Race, Race, Race, Race....

StanfordHarvardYale — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:53:34 GMT

Blogger Tough shows commendable interest in the education of poor minorities but not so much interest in the racial assumptions underlying NCLB.

As we know, desegregation dealt a huge blow to our cities and their schools. Many, if not most inner cities were depopulated of whites in response to desegregation of schools (St. Louis' population was cut in half, for instance). We went from 'separate but equal' (not really equal, of course) to completely dysfunctional urban schools and stressed-out suburban schools/parents. Our national ideal of a leafy suburban paradise wasn't driven only by the availability of cars and highways, but also by the no-win politics of urban school systems. Kids and parents didn't want to be integrated, but our courts said otherwise. You can't say no one paid a price for this, either.

NCLB is in some ways a commendable effort to pick up the pieces left behind by decimated urban schools, but below the surface lie some of the same racial assumptions that undermined our efforts to desegregate. I literally learned at my grandmother's knee that blacks and whites are exactly the same, regardless of skin color. This was basically a religious matter for my grandmother, who was very proud that her Quaker forefathers had fought slavery and she was equally proud of her lefty/religious support of civil rights. To her, desegregation was going to be the beginning of the end of racism. She believed, as a matter of faith, that kids who were educated together would have the same outcomes--they would act and dress similarly, they would have the same attitudes and values.

NCLB seems to take this provocative 'race means nothing' hypothesis and push it to center stage. At some point we need to sort out if people really believe after all these years that all kids, regardless of ethnicity, learn the same, and can accomplish the same things at the same time. Without getting into the evidence, I think there are a lot of well-intentioned white folks, the spiritual descendants of Grandma, who are stubbornly, religiously unwilling to entertain any evidence to the contrary. Blogger Tough at times seems to belong to this group.

If you take the time to talk to some people of color you might learn that black people generally don't think they are just the same as white people. Same with many hispanics, asians, even Jewish people. Really, the only holdouts seem to be a certain breed of fiercely idealistic white people who can't imagine anyone wanting to be, or worse yet, being, any different than themselves.

Documenting the effects of NCLB, as Tough has been doing, offers an opportunity to discuss how to meet the different needs of different ethnic groups. In schools with no white people left, it is obvious that teachers are experimenting with different learning environments for minorities. The question is, will teachers in integrated school districts ever be allowed to selectively apply these lessons to the kids who need different treatment? If our courts and legislators continue to insist upon treating every kid the same, regardless of their needs, for fear of violating our idealistic racial sensibilities we're headed for trouble. If this is too sensitive an issue for courts and lawmakers, perhaps they need to get out of the business of race-based educational goals and allow people to choose their schools, and their racial identities, for themselves.

It's not as easy to stop as you'd think

Utz_the_Crab_chip — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:04:23 GMT

So, if the teachers don't proctor their own tests then who will?

Other Teachers in the school? Great, but if the administration is the force behind the cheating, then the cheating will still occur, and if there is an understood culture in the school that cheating is acceptable, then you haven't solved anything either.

Teachers from other schools? I'm not sure how you make this work. On test day, students come to a school where they don't know any of the adults? Teachers need to figure out the layout of a new building? This won't work either, unless you start the test 2 hours late, and still have a lot of kids miss it.

Parent Volunteers? Um, if we're talking about about schools in high-poverty areas, this notion is laughable.

Paid community members? And this money is coming from where exactly?

So, what else can we do?

An actual education setback

BenK — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:35:03 GMT

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08266/914029-298.stm

I thought I had seen the depths to which self-esteem foolishness would sink. I was wrong.

Cheating

skendarr — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 23:18:40 GMT

My husband and I teach Sunday School and today our lesson was on honesty. I was shocked and saddened when our students told us that they all cheat on a regular basis. What made the discussion even worse was that none of them seemed to find cheating to be morally wrong or questionable. Instead, they insisted that it was the only way to get through school and that it was acceptable.

Unfortunately, if parents, administrators, and students find cheating to be acceptable, then we are dooming these kids to huge failures in their future lives.

Cheating Teachers

smp91178 — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 01:04:12 GMT

I am a former NYC teacher whose school relied on test scores just to get by. We were encouraged by administration to let the kids know non-verbally when they were on the wrong track during testing. And I will be the first one to admit that I helped.... to see how hard these kids work during the year and how long they stay at school every day just to squeak by is heart-breaking. When you watch children throw up and cry right before the test, you know that this is the wrong to educate. THIS IS NOT WAT SHOULD COUNT! But NCLB has ruined any sort of inner-city education or progress. There is an uneven playing field.
When administrators take you into a room and scream at you even if your test results were the top in your grade level, we know that this is not working.... it is up to the next government administration to change this.

Amistad's "success" with 8th grade math

galtonian — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 04:10:41 GMT

The claims about Amistad's "success" with 8th grade math test scores are baloney.

The issue is whether black students, as a group, are able to perform math at a level equal to white or Asian students. Followers of Francis Galton recognize that there are ethnic differences in innate intelligence. Followers of Franz Boas believe that all ethnic groups have the same mental abilities. The point of Tough's post is to claim that black students, when given superb training as in charter schools such as Amistad, can perform at the level of white students. Tough insinuates that Amistad-trained black students are able to show higher math achievement than the children of Yale faculty at Worthington Hooker School. If this is true, then the fact that black students have an average IQ of 85 (compared to the white average of 100) would appear to be of little importance with regard to the racial gap in academic achievement. But perhaps Tough's claims are really not true.

Lets look at the actual data regarding 8th grade math scores on the Connecticut CMT test in years 2006, 2007, 2008. The following scores are the percent of each ethnic group that scores at the advanced level in 8th grade math exam for years 2006, 2007, 2008. The advanced level is the level at which students on track to be prospective applicants for good colleges would be expected to perform. In addition to Worthington Hooker School in New Haven, also scores from two upscale suburbs (Cheshire and Guilford where many Yale faculty live) are also posted.

State Asian: 44.1, 46.6, 47.8

State White: 30.7, 34.4, 34.0

State Black: 4.3, 5.2, 5.6

Amistad Black: 2.9, 12.5, 12.2

Worthington Hooker: 33.3, 33.3, 27.3

Cheshire: 40.5, 47.4, 50.6

Guilford: 49.3, 55.2, 60.9

Assuming that Amistad did not have their students cheat on the tests, what they managed to achieve was to get their black students to perform on the state 8th grade math test during years 2007, and 2008 at levels higher than most other blacks, but still far lower than the state white average, and very far lower than the level of Yale faculty children in the upscale suburbs.

You can check out the data yourself at this link:

Hints for accessing the data: Amistad is listed as a separate district. When you get into the tables click on "Scores" to get the percentage at advanced level.

The "proficiency" level that Tough might be refering to is so low that it is a joke. Just because some student of low IQ can be trained to the level of "proficient" does not mean the the student is actually smart enough to handle serious college work. If they really can score at the advanced level, then it actually means something. The limited success that Amistad achieved in increasing the performance of black students was probably a combination of selection (compared to lower IQ black students more higher IQ black students apply to Amistad and stick with their demanding curriculum) and more rigorous teaching. However, a jump in performance of whites and Asians would also no doubt result from a more rigorous approach.

Teachers who cheat ought to be strung up, no doubt

Anse — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:56:04 GMT

It's indefensible.

On a somewhat related note, there is widespread concern that there is too much emphasis on standardized testing. As this article suggests, this atmosphere motivates schools to take and "any means necessary" approach to testing, and cheating is one result.

My feeling is that we ought to recognize that testing is the only way the taxpayer can get a clear picture of what is going on in their local schools. There just isn't any other way. And the taxpayer (including, of course, parents) have a right to know.

I say we go all the way and fully embrace standardized testing as a part of academic life. So what if teachers "teach to the test?" Life is full of tests, and if you can't pass them, you won't succeed. Every surgery is a test for the surgeon. Every new building is a test for the architect and the builders. Every new product is a test for the manufacturer and the retailer.

A surgeon will not be judged by his past performance. He will be judged by how well he treated the last patient under his knife. He could be the greatest surgeon of all time, but if he makes a mistake and a patient dies, he's going to get sued, and rightfully so. It's a life-or-death situation. You can't trade on past glories.

So I don't care for these "cumulative" assessment ideas that get thrown around. You can trot out every assignment a kid has done over the last year and show me how much progress he has made, and I may very well be impressed. But if the kid can't perform on the test at hand, what good is all that progress?

Simplest explanation for failure

Philidor — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:30:17 GMT

Quoting from a New Haven Register story as repeated in the article:

Last year, 19 of the 56 students in Amistad's ninth grade—the same cohort that scored so well on the eighth-grade tests in 2007—failed at least one course. And 11 students, 20 percent of the grade, failed two courses, meaning that they did not move on to the tenth grade.

Quoting the author's summary:

It's not quite clear just what this means. Last year, the 10th-grade students at Amistad once again did very well on the state achievement tests. So by outside measures, achievement at the school remains high. And yet many students are struggling to meet Amistad High's own standards, even after four or five years of Amistad education.

[End quotes]

So students do well on tests and fail subsequent course work. A quote fropm the school considers independent thought an important issue. The author blames past experience from before the charter school.

I think the school itself was trying to give the simplest explanation a quasi-positive spin. The students were intensively taught the test. Limited rote learning. They go beyond what they're taught, they fail.

Standardized tests are necessary. So is learning the basics. But successfully teaching to the test shouldn't lead to over-optimistic preedictions of future learning, I suspect.

Charter schools cherry-picking??

Shenping — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:48:52 GMT

I'm not entirely sure cherry-picking is the word I'm looking for, but here goes.

The current lot of charter schools springing up in disadvantaged neighbourhoods seem to be founded & managed by groups & individuals with tremendous concern for the kids, amazing work ethics & seemingly limitless energy. I don't see any surprise that these schools tend to outperform public schools in regions where the school boards are made up of wanna-be career politicians or who don't have much faith in the children they are supposed to represent.

I'm concerned that the message from this will be "privatize all schools". Creating the kind of charter schools that are this successful is a difficult, time-consuming process, and one that seems unique to each situation. Even the successful ones discussed here have had setbacks, and have had to rethink their methods many times. I don't think this is a process that can be packaged and sold at will. There are a lot of lessons to be learned on why these charter schools are successful, but they can be applied to any school system, public or charter. Any privitization that is ideologically based and not based on fixing specific problems & responding to specific circumstances will probably create the same problems as the public schools they replace, but be less accountable.

have teachers switch schools on exam day

jvanke — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:19:21 GMT

A fairly simple solution (until it's tested and any flaws discovered):

When the tests are given, send teachers to schools not their own. Mix them up rather than one-on-one swaps, and don't announce the school assignments until something like a day in advance.

Why teaching sucks a**...

William Diaz — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:30:07 GMT

There are many reasons why a career in teaching is unattractive to many and a 'teired' abortion of a system wouldnt address many of the concerns and difficulties that drive out or prevent many from entering the teaching profession. I will list my complaints, firt, then some of the things I see as possible solutions.

1) Teaching sucks because children nowadays are ill mannered little pissants that need a swift kick in the ass, possibly several times a day.

2) Teaching sucks because these kids got that way somehow, and you get to meet them on parent-teacher nights.

3) Teaching sucks, because to get a degree costs thousands upon thousands of dollars, and starting teacher pay is less than an assistant manager at Burger King makes.

4) Teaching sucks, because people think that you work a breezy 8-3 and have nothing better to do with your spare time than work on your golf game etc.

5) Teaching sucks, because most principals only works as teachers for the minimum of 5 years (required) before trying to become administrators. They only view their stint as a teacher as a pre-req, not as a vitally important career that they can draw experience and understanding from.

6) Teaching sucks, because every goddamn moron parent wih a degree thinks they know your job better than you and feels compelled to tell you how you need to be sensitive to the needs of their special snowflake. Additionally, since their lives completely revolve around the axis of a waste of a perfectly good social security number, yours should too.

7) Teaching sucks, because when your friends toss their car keys up on the counter, they have nice, new cars and live in decent homes. As a teacher in the first 5 years of teaching, you drive a beat up shitbox and live in a slum.

8) Teaching sucks, because everything you do, every word you say, every action you perform puts you and your career potentially at risk. Teachers have never been more afraid to discipline students (or even correct them) due to fears of their own physical and legal safety. In inverse proportion to teacher's unwillingness to discipline students, the need has never been higher. Recipe for disaster....

These are obviously broad strokes and dont apply to all teachers and all school circumstances. I have taught and been involved with teaching sufficiently to know the truth of all this shit and it disturbs me greatly. Teachers are the craftsmen that create the next generation of taxpayers. It is intricate, difficult, tiring work that requires patience, skill, knowledge, a deep emotional (and spiritual?) commitment and creativity that most people will never posess.

Some of my ideas for improving the lot of teachers (and thus schools)...

a) Schools are not prisons, nor are they treatment facilities. Behavioral difficulties, emotional issues etc are best handled outside of the classroom. Letting children run riot is wrong. A teacher should be the complete and undisputed master of anything that occurs in his/her room and there should be no doubt in anyones mind of their suzerainity (sp?). I believe that teacher's should be like the samurai of old, with full powers of life and death in their domain, but I dont think that is going to happen.

b) If a parent wants to be involved in a child's education, let them make sure homework gets done. If they want to help in school, let them volunteer as (unpaid) teacher's aides with some standard periodicity. If you screwed with a mechanic or carpenter (etc) while they were trying to get their work done, they would hit you with a tool. I would at least...

c) Loan forgiveness up to 100k at 20k per year for 5 years. Enough said...

d) In-house training should be a constant and important part of life. Summertime teacher's conferences in nice places should be encouraged and paid for by school districts. There should be some designation of 'master teacher', and each master teacher should have some number of new teachers assigned to them. If 2 sections of a class are taught and a new teacher has one of them, the master responsible for their professional development should have the other. The 'sink or swim' method of learning such an important art is completely bullshit and retarded.

e) Master teachers (however they are decided) should have complete personnel control of the teachers under them and should serve as a buffer between the administration and the educators. Ideally, the person that runs a business should have some clue about wtf it actually does, but more and more administrators either in the public or private sector are completely ignorant of the business they run.

I would finish, but I need to go get my wife. I will bitch and complain more later, if anyone is interested...

Have a great day!

Socio-economic facade

FordTruck5Speed — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:42:48 GMT

This is actually a re-post of a reply I made earlier, but I think it's worth its own thread. If you've seen this before, I apologize in advance. Socio-economic status has been overemphasized in this discussion, and I believe this question needs to be asked.. Did we first discover poverty last week? Doubtful. Let me ask you all a vital question to this discussion. How many of us had rich, well-off parents? Now, how many of us had rich, well-off grandparents? Great-grandparents? I'm sure the number gets smaller with each generation as we go back. Didn't our grandparents and great-grandparents figure out a way to learn what they needed to learn and eventually make a living for themselves? My grandmother was born in 1922. She had plenty of memories of the real Great Depression. When a bowl of cereal was your big meal for the week, or when actually putting moo-cow milk on it instead of water was a luxury, one has to ask just how important socio-economic status really is. My grandparents generation struggled, toiled and suffered. Not a handful of them, most of them. Yet, in the end, they wound up with their own free-standing house, a car or two, and maybe even a color TV. They got through it, and no, they weren't stupid.

From a racial perspective, this is, in a nut shell, a race-bating society, hence why so much of this discussion involves race. Herein lies a societal problem that manifests itself in our schools. Many folks look for anything they can find that appears to be racist and ride that horse till it keels over. If a school or program for low-performing students has more blacks than whites, some idiot will say that it's a segregationist dumping ground for blacks. No, it's a class for low-performing kids, it just so happens that more of them are black. Here we are trying to provide a solution that we can't use. And we wonder why our schools are failing? I think this proves the point in my first post on this matter.

I think it's clear that someone that is in any kind of position of authority in a school or district start making the case that we need to simply stop talking about race because it's distracting us from the real purpose of school. At some point, be it school programs, employers, colleges, banks, insurance companies, or whatever, need to place, accept, or deny people based on merit and actual accomplishment. A huge reason we are in the mortgage situation we're in is because bankers' policies of minimum loans, application fees, and yes, loan denials, were called "racist" (this was back in 1992) because poor people from the inner city (primarily black) couldn't get loans. Forget that they couldn't afford them, we had to make sure they got 'em. Presto-chango, you have a mortgage crisis.

This is why I'm so adamant about parents actually giving a damn about their kids and being involved in their education. It isn't just about money or race. If you have enough to eat, keep a roof over your head and clothes on your body, that should be more than enough to get through learning your multiplication tables. Hard work and accountability cannot be replaced by government policy or school initiatives. It may sound harsh, but it is true.

Only one way for standardized testing to work.

patron002 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:32:12 GMT

Be like France and have every day planned to the exact minute. In France every teacher that is teaching algebra 1 is teaching the exact same thing on the exact same day. A National lesson plan is the absolute only way that standardized testing can be of any value. Considering the most enduring and endearing quality of Americans is our individualism I doubt that we really want this kind of conformity in the classroom.

Simple Answer to Cheating

mchebert — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:46:02 GMT

If you want to test to find out the achievement level of the students, cheating presents a difficult problem. But if you want to use testing to evaluate teachers, that is much easier.

Randomized testing. Since your goal is to see if teachers are teaching the required material, all students don't have to take the test. Simply pull a representative sample, an equal number of boys and girls, one at a time on various days in the year. Six out of a class of 30 would probably do. Pull the students out for a day individually on 6 different days.

This wouldn't give an accurate measurement of the student, since the kids would be tested at different times of the year, but it would tell the school system whether or not the kids themselves were being exposed to the material they were supposed to be exposed to.

Tough now thinking about cheating, how about Promise scores?

galtonian — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:17:35 GMT

Well Mr.Tough is now thinking about cheating on standardized achievement tests. He should have considered this possibility before so credulously accepting the surprising "success" of the Harlem Zone's Promise Academy on New York State Regent Exams in 2008 after years of mediocre test scores. As I discussed in a post to this discussion forum last week, one should be highly suspicious that Mr. Canada and/or some of his teachers helped the Promise Academy students with their tests in 2008.

apocryphal anecdote

Pericles — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:53:14 GMT

Must we continue to base our opinions on dubious personal accounts from partisan shills.

Testing, 1...2...Testing

FordTruck5Speed — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:43:40 GMT

Short preface...not in favor of the endless onslaught of week-long tests, basing pay on test scores is a bad idea, and cheating sucks.

Now, I will pose a question to you all here. You have a kid, call him Ralph, is taking the PSSA-SAT-ESPN2-NMSQT-ABCDEFG. Ralph gets to question 36-B and doesn't understand the question. In ANY OTHER TESTING SITUATION, teachers are instructed to re-explain the question. Not give the answer, but perhaps clarify the question for the student so that he has a fighting chance of getting it right. Now, are we saying Ralph should get the question wrong/fail the test/not graduate/give up his first born, etc., because he didn't understand the question? I don't believe in cheating (see above), but I don't like this idea that the teacher shouldn't speak (or even be in the room) while these high-stakes, high-pressure tests are going on.

In the interest of context, let's not talk about a senior here that's getting ready to go to college. Let's talk about a fifth grader that has to take these things. I honestly can't figure out why a teacher shouldn't be able to clarify a question on a test for a 10-year old. 17 or 18 may be a different story, but it's not just high-schoolers that are taking these tests. Kids in 2nd and 3rd grade are taking them. I just get the distinct impression that we're overdoing it with these mass-insanity standardized tests.

The reality that no one talks about

FordTruck5Speed — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:40:08 GMT

The inherent problem with public education is that it is, well, public. You have a system that is doomed to fail someone. Think about it. When something is designed to "reach the masses," it effectively means that it is one-size-fits-all. As we all know, this doesn't work with T-shirts, much less education.

When people talk about bridging the proverbial gap, it's always the same conversation. The government empowerment types always shout for more money, more laws, more testing. The free-market guys call for school choice and teachers competing for pay. I'm only asking this. Why have we only gone at this from one side?

I know a number of people that went the charter school route, and it was the best decision that they ever made. Why? Because they, like most of us, are looking to meet the individual needs of their kids, which is something public schools fail miserably at, though not for lack of trying.

The problem is that we have worked ourselves into this idea that a school for the "masses" must also be individualized, whereby it is forced to integrate learning-disabled students into regular classrooms. It might make them feel good, but it's not necessarily giving them a better education. Teachers, without aides present, must pace the class differently just so those kids don't get completely lost. Yet, the quicker students will bog down and stagnate in their education. Doing it right costs money, because you need the aide in there working with the one or two kids that will be way behind. Hence the need for more funding, starting the calls to the state and federal government which inevitably result in too little funding, meaning the school has to cut something else (like band and orchestra, for example), leaving a hole somewhere for someone. The phrase "You can't please everyone" certainly comes into play here.

If public schools are going to succeed, they must do one of the following things. 1) Admit that you can't give everything to everyone. At least that's honest. Legislators, you guys should wake up on this as well, because no law you write will ever change this. 2) Act more like a charter school. Feel free to track, departmentalize, group, sort, rank and file. Let the "smart" kids go the academic route. Let the hands-on guys go to vo-tech. Let the artistic kids concentrate on music and art. Stop trying to put everyone into one gigantic group and run around like a Wall Street trader trying to snag every individual kid. 3) Stop voting for the same people over and over again. The politicians you elect to "save our schools" inevitably write legislation that does something to hurt them. This last one is for government. PLEASE stop trying to test everything with standardized tests. Some things just don't lend themselves to bubble sheets. I'm waiting for the day that taking a leak and flushing is on the test (although some of our brighter students do seem to have trouble with that one).

"Public" education, as we know it, isn't going away. Ever. But we can learn something from the few flashes of the free-market that make their way into they system. Add a little free choice into the mix and good things can happen. After all, we are all "pro-choice," right?

I absolutely don't understand why cheating isn't stopped

mchichi — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:27:46 GMT

Seems like preventing cheating like that would be as easy as hiring anybody with working eyes and ears (retiree, college student, whoever) who didn't know the teacher to sit in on the class for minimum wage during testing. The rule is simple- no talking to the kids. No teacher would dare break it (outside of an emergency) if they were being monitored.

Or, why even have the teacher in the room at all? Random person hands out the tests, makes sure the kids don't talk to each other, handles any emergencies, and takes up the tests. Why is this difficult?

Cheating

mustireallyweighin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:51:35 GMT

Stopping cheating on standardized tests is simple. Much like university level exams, have all tests taken in a large common room (cafeteria) under the supervision of the faculty.

However

Nobody in the system has a vested interest in preventing this. Test scores mean funding, political success, promotions, status quo etc...etc....

The idea that learning is important has gone by the wayside in favor of simply moving students along and reaping the highest benefits possible as a teacher/principal etc...

The solution, I would think, would be to have parents more involved as a group who are concerned more with their kids learning than teacher bonuses.

I taught in HISD under Dr Paige..

William Diaz — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:33:14 GMT

And during the Bush era. God, what a mess that was. It is no suprise that test scores rose, the tests just became much easier. I remember when it happened, it was a joke.

But to let you in on the joke, lemme tell you a story. I taught geometry at a magnet school. There were 3 levels of geometry, AP, regular and descriptive geometry. So it was decided that escriptive geometry was a waste of teacher time and resources, so it was dropped. Score one for Bush, no?

Well, no, because thats not how it worked out. They dropped descriptive geometry as a title, but not as a concept. What was once descriptive geometry, became regular geometry and what was once 'regular' geometry, became AP. The reality of it was, rather than dropping the lowest one, they actually eliminated the highest one...

Theres a moral here somewhere, but I just cant seem to figure out what it might be.

Have a great day!

Change that culture

BenK — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:59:41 GMT

"Do poor black and Hispanic kids really need to be in "no excuses" schools that insist on rote learning and rote behavior? That take control of their lives and change their culture?"

This is naturally inflammatory language, and it needs to be pushed back against just a little harder than the columnist did.

First... all kids who come from a culture of irresponsibility need to have their culture stripped away and irrevocably changed. I don't care whether it is Kennedy kids who cheat on exams or middle class butterballs who get home and are glued to the TV until pizza for dinner or kids who hang out at the bodega on the street corner hassling the customers and wearing pants at their ankles.

It doesn't matter how wealthy or how poor, race or gender - kids need examples of discipline, and until they establish their own discipline through practice, they need it established for them. That culture needs changing, those lives need to be taken control of - by somebody. Parents, ideally. Neighbors possibly. Teachers, as a second-to-last resort. The juvenile detention centers in extremis.

Discipline is not just rote learning and rote behavior. Character is not all about repression, though it really does start there. First, don't do anything wrong. Don't hurt people. Don't hurt yourself. Don't disrupt the class. Listen before speaking. Do no harm.

Then, get the basics down. Do your duty. Learn those basic skills. Respect people. Dress neatly.

Next, helping others. Cooperate, coordinate. Go beyond your duty and receive your due rewards.

Fourth, selfless service and creativity. Do things you haven't been asked to and others wouldn't ask you to. Don't repress your desire to do good, even if it will cost you or you might get punished. Move ahead to be a leader, protect the weak.

This is not rote living, though dutiful success is its foundation. This is a full life. This is the only culture worth cultivating - and it crosses ethnic lines. It could be modestly Jewish, humbly Buddhist, enthusiastically Christian, harmoniously Confucian, etc. Any education that doesn't either start with a student like this or end with a student like this will not succeed and will not promote good in society.

So, yes. Those poor black and hispanic children need to be in a 'no excuses' school that pushes them through the first two stages at minimum. That any person objects shows how depraved their own understanding of the situation has become.